Download Cypress e&p Corporation High-performance exploration BRINGING OPTIMIZATION AND SCALABILITY TO HIGH-PERFORMING APPLICATIONS

Cypress E&P Corporation
High-performance exploration
BRINGING OPTIMIZATION AND SCALABILITY
TO HIGH-PERFORMING APPLICATIONS
Challenges
• Needed scalability, redundancy, and
high-fault tolerance with high-performance
environment
• Vast amounts of seismic and well data to
manage and analyze
Solutions
• EMC Isilon Scale-out NAS Storage Platform
• Seismic Micro-Technology
(SMT) Kingdom Suite
Key benefits
• Unified data to centralized network
storage with single namespace
• Improved security as no data stored at
each workstation
• Protected against file corruptions and with
a clear path of recovery
Geoscientists have many options for exploration tools and applications—but delivering data
access to these tools and protecting vast amounts of data is an ongoing IT challenge for oil and
gas companies. Cypress E&P selected SMT’s Kingdom Suite, a Windows®-based exploration
and production application, for its ease of use and wide range of techniques to analyze data.
Eric R. Bass, Director of Information Technology, says, “My goal is to assemble the highest
performing technologies I can find into a powerful yet flexible platform to run our company
on....With SMT Kingdom running on EMC® Isilon®, I can focus on building the infrastructure and
providing support to enhance what Kingdom does for our company, keeping our exploration
team productive.”
As a Windows-based tool, SMT has proven useful for the specialized needs of exploration
companies. It has offered the flexibility and scalability required for innovative new workflows.
Pairing the right storage solution with SMT applications has resulted in an optimal solution for
those in the oil and gas exploration industry.
Early on, Cypress was a DAS environment; the SMT application and projects were running on
individual workstations with no consolidation of data. The DAS file server model did not
provide the performance necessary to host projects on the network—particularly over 10/100
Ethernet. Bass was managing disparate silos of storage and found even with RAID, hard
drives would fail and volumes would be lost. 3D seismic and well data had to be loaded
separately on each workstation, complicating data management. “Backing up in an effective
way was a nightmare,” he said. Geoscientists were worried about the security and
accessibility of data and were concerned about having data reside on separate workstations.
Keeping all the projects current was a never-ending battle.
Moving to an optimal storage platform
Bass started on the first phase of consolidation, taking pieces of data off the workstations
and putting it on the network. He purchased an IP storage area network (SAN) storage system
but quickly found inherent limitations because data and applications aren’t accessed
through a file server. Cypress now had centralized storage and data protection, but they
also had a bottleneck at the file server in front of the storage. It was a particular problem for
Cypress—they still couldn’t fully centralize projects and therefore couldn’t use SMT solutions
to their fullest potential. “Moving data to the network was a big improvement but without
scalable high throughput file sharing on the front end, we had to connect workstations
directly to their own volumes on the SAN, making project consolidation and data sharing
very difficult,” Bass said. With a need to centralize their projects and maximize the benefits
of their SMT solution, they realized that a new approach to centralized storage—one that
would make data available to all clients simultaneously—was required. After considering
other storage options, Cypress determined that Isilon scale-out network-attached solution
(NAS) was the ideal solution.
C u stomer P rofile
Today, Cypress has unified their data on a single global namespace, eliminating the inherent
risk of data being stored at each individual workstation. “We’ve moved all of our geoscience
software projects to our centralized network storage, so now everyone can work with the
data and we don’t have the bottleneck of file servers in between. Our SMT environment in
particular has benefited greatly from the Isilon storage cluster.” Bass offers this advice for IT
Managers facing similar challenges and choices: “Before you settle for older storage
technologies—whether they be DAS, SAN, or even simple NAS—take a close look at the Isilon
scale-out clustered NAS approach and consider the tremendous performance and flexibility it
will give you in storing and managing data in your enterprise.”
Isilon Solution
Cypress purchased their first Isilon nodes two years ago. As of October 2009, they have expanded
to five 6000x nodes for 26TB of usable capacity. Most importantly, they have been running at
83 percent utilization with no security or performance issues. Bass says, “Isilon offers great
redundancy; the SnapshotIQ™ technology gives us point-in-time snapshots to step back to
on-the-fly updates if needed.” Now, we are protected against file corruptions and have a path of
recovery.” Isilon’s web-based UI also enables Cypress to manage their storage cluster remotely.
Compared to earlier storage solutions he utilized, Bass has seen his time spent on storage
management take a dramatic turn—for the better. “The way the Isilon storage runs, unless I
just want to monitor performance stats, I can ignore it for weeks at a time. I rarely have to do
any tweaking to the system and the only storage administration I need to do is data management
and create new folders,” he says. Bass says on a day-to-day basis he likes to keep his
management console open to keep an eye on performance, utilization, and percentage of
capacity—but he wouldn’t be concerned if he didn’t.
About Cypress: Cypress E&P Corporation is generating and drilling prospects primarily in the
deep, highly pressured Wilcox trend of the Texas Gulf Coast. Cypress utilizes 3D-based exploration
tools, and has also implemented projects to evaluate remote sensing technologies including
passive seismic, magnetotellurics, radar, airborne gamma, soil gas, and other techniques.
About SMT: Seismic Micro-Technology, Inc. (SMT) developed the first geoscience interpretation
tools for the Windows environment. SMT exploration and production software is used by
geoscientists in 95 countries.
“When organizations use Isilon with SMT, it’s really smooth and
they get the performance they need.”
Bob Tucker
Director of Sustaining Engineering at SMT
Contact Us
To learn more about how EMC Isilon
products, services, and solutions help solve
your business and IT challenges, contact
your local representative or authorized
reseller—or visit us at www.EMC.com/Isilon.
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trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners. All rights reserved. Published in the USA. 03/12 Customer Profile H10608
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